Left Is Not Woke

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Neiman received a copy of all the responses to her Cambridge talk, with some of Buxton’s comments incorporated into Neiman’s text, albeit without crediting Buxton. One can read this book in a single sitting, not just due to its length but because Neiman’s fluid writing carries readers along comfortably even as she courses through the likes of Schmitt’s political theology or evolutionary psychology.

Thus does Neiman ask at the outset: ‘Which do you find more essential: the accidents we are born with, or the principles we consider and uphold? He is the author of States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (2022). Samuel Clowes Huneke is assistant professor of history at George Mason University, focusing on modern Germany and the history of sexuality. One of the more interesting critiques of the phenomenon in question, although it does not employ the term ‘woke,’ is Todd McGowan’s Universalism and Identity Politics (2020), which explicitly links identity politics with the existential emptiness that is left behind after capitalism has hollowed out communities and left people without the resources of group identity. The looming danger of an ephemeral enemy of the people – the “woke” – has been a financial boon to traditional print media.Without universalism, there is no argument against racism, merely a bunch of tribes jockeying for power’ (108). Susan Neiman's provocative book is an impassioned defense against the corrosive particularisms that have eroded solidarity on the left.

All these genealogical roots are held together, so Neiman alleges, by a rejection of “Enlightenment” values. Neiman’s insistence on the importance of universalism is particularly apposite in the current emotional responses to the Gaza conflict. If you equate those fighting for queer rights and those fighting against police brutality with the Nazis, you have lost the plot. Given the recent publication of Huaping Lu-Adler’s Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere (2023), there is a sense in which these debates are just beginning. And yet, personally, I don’t think the appropriate diagnosis is that they have all gone – along with The New York Times – “woke”.

end by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization […] The idea of intersectionality […] [has] led to a focus on those parts of identities that are most marginalized and multiplies them into a forest of trauma. After all, Mozart’s famous opera The Magic Flute, which historian Paul Robinson has described as “fully explicit in its Enlightenment values,” stakes a claim that only white men can access reason.

On the face of it, then, this is the one novel aspect to Neiman’s book when compared with prior anti-woke literature.Woke” is also allegedly indebted to Michel Foucault (because of its apparent focus on power rather than justice) and evolutionary psychology (because of its apparent cynical attitude towards altruism and belief that all human behaviour is selfish). From the editor: In a previous version of the above review, an accusation of plagiarism was made against Professor Neiman.

At its best, the new forms of identity-based thinking will serve to enrich our aspirations for a true humanism. Richard Wolin’s 2023 book, Heidegger in Ruins , stands as an illustrative example, deftly tying together the evidence of Heidegger’s malign influence on some parts of leftist thinking; Neiman’s book does not.Have you ever wondered what strip clubs, the military-industrial complex, corporations, quangos, medical education, capitalism, gardeners, a BBC adaptation of a Jane Austen book, The Railway Children , Scouting, Love Island , asset managers, the U. By rejecting the Enlightenment’s universalizing claims, the argument goes, his work robs us of our ability to better the world.